The Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton (Vol. 1&2). Lady Isabel Burton
who could be useful to him when he wishes to start them in life. The conditions of society in England are so complicated, and so artificial, that those who would make their way in the world, especially in public careers, must be broken to it from their earliest day. The future soldiers and statesmen must be prepared by Eton and Cambridge. The more English they are, even to the cut of their hair, the better. In consequence of being brought up abroad, we never thoroughly understood English society, nor did society understand us. And, lastly, it is a real advantage to belong to some parish. It is a great thing, when you have won a battle, or explored Central Africa, to be welcomed home by some little corner of the Great World, which takes a pride in your exploits, because they reflect honour upon itself. In the contrary condition you are a waif, a stray; you are a blaze of light, without a focus. Nobody outside your own fireside cares.
No man ever gets on in the world, or rises to the head of affairs, unless he is a representative of his nation. Taking the marking characters of the last few years—Palmerston, Thiers, Cavour, and Bismarck—what were they but simply the types of their various nationalities? In point of intellect Cavour was a first-rate man, Thiers second-rate, Palmerston third-rate, whilst Bismarck was strength, Von Moltke brain. Their success in life was solely owing to their representing the failings, as well as the merits of their several nationalities. Thiers, for instance, was the most thoroughbred possible épicier, and yet look at his success. And his death was mourned even in England, and yet he was the bitterest enemy that England ever had. His Chauvinism did more than the Crimean War to abolish the prestige of England. Unhappily for his Chauvinism, it also thoroughly abolished France.
Mr. Du Pré, the tutor, and Miss Ruxton, the governess, had their work cut out for them. They attempted to commence with a strict discipline; for instance, the family passing through Paris lodged at the Hôtel Windsor, and they determined to walk the youngsters out school fashion. The consequence was that when the walk extended to the boulevards, the young ones, on agreement, knowing Paris well, suddenly ran away, and were home long before the unfortunate strangers could find their way, and reported that their unlucky tutor and governess had been run over by an omnibus. There was immense excitement till the supposed victims walked in immensely tired, having wandered over half Paris, not being able to find their way. A scene followed, but the adversaries respected each other more after that day.
The difficulty was now where to colonize. One of the peculiarities of the little English colonies was the unwillingness of their denizens to return to them when once they had left them. My father had been very happy at Tours, and yet he religiously avoided it. He passed through Orleans—a horrid hole, with as many smells as Cologne—and tried to find a suitable country house near it, but in vain; everything seemed to smell of goose and gutter. Then he drifted on to Blois, in those days a kind of home of the British stranger, and there he thought proper to call a halt. At last a house was found on the high ground beyond the city, which, like Tours, lies mainly on the left bank of the river, and where most of the English colonists dwelt. There is no necessity of describing this little bit of England in France, which was very like Tours. When one describes one colony, one describes them all. The notables were Sir Joseph Leeds, Colonel Burnes, and a sister of Sir Stamford Raffles, who lived in the next-door villa, if such a term may be applied to a country house in France in 1831. The only difference from Tours was, there was no celebrated physician, no pack of hounds, and no parson. Consequently service on Sundays had to be read at home by the tutor, and the evening was distinguished by one of Blair's sermons. This was read out by us children, each taking a turn. The discourse was from one of Blair's old three volumes, which appeared to have a soporific effect upon the audience. Soft music was gradually heard proceeding from the nasal organs of father and mother, tutor and governess; and then we children, preserving the same tone of voice, entered into a conversation, and discussed matters, until the time came to a close.
Education at Blois.
At Blois we were now entering upon our teens; our education was beginning in real earnest. Poor Miss Ruxton soon found her task absolutely impossible, and threw up the service. A schoolroom was instituted, where time was wasted upon Latin and Greek for six or seven hours a day, besides which there was a French master—one of those obsolete little old men, who called themselves Professeurs-ès-lettres, and the great triumph of whose life was that he had read Herodotus in the original. The dancing-master was a large and pompous oldster, of course an ancien militaire, whose kit and whose capers were by contrast peculiarly ridiculous, and who quoted at least once every visit, "Oh, Richard! oh, mon roi!" He taught, besides country dances, square and round, the Minuet de la Cour, the Gavotte de Vestris, and a Danse Chinoise, which consisted mainly in turning up thumbs and toes. The only favourite amongst all those professors was the fencing-master, also an old soldier, who had lost the thumb of his right hand in the wars, which of course made him a gauché in loose fencing. We boys gave ourselves up with ardour to this study, and passed most of our leisure hours in exchanging thrusts. We soon learned not to neglect the mask: I passed my foil down Edward's throat, and nearly destroyed his uvula, which caused me a good deal of sorrow. The amusements consisted chiefly of dancing at evening parties, we boys choosing the tallest girls, especially a very tall Miss Donovan. A little fishing was to be had, my father being a great amateur. There were long daily walks, swimming in summer, and brass cannons, bought in the toy shops, were loaded to bursting.
The swimming was very easily taught; in the present day boys and girls go to school and learn it like dancing. In our case Mr. Du Pré supported us by a hand under the stomach, taught us how to use our arms and legs, and to manage our breath, after which he withdrew his hand and left us to float as we best could.
This life lasted for a year, till all were thoroughly tired of it. Our father and mother were imperceptibly lapsing into the category of professed invalids, like people who have no other business in life, except to be sick. This was a class exceptionally common in the unoccupied little English colonies that studded the country. It was a far robuster institution than the Parisian invalid, whose object in life was to appear maladive et souffrante. The British malade consumed a considerable quantity of butcher's meat, but although he or she always saw death in the pot, they had not the moral courage to refuse what disagreed with them. They tried every kind of drug and nostrum known, and answered every advertisement, whether it agreed with their complaint or not. Their table de nuit was covered with bottles and gallipots. They dressed themselves three or four times a day for the change of climate, and insensibly acquired a horror of dining out, or passing the evening away from home. They had a kind of rivalry with other invalids; nothing offended them more than to tell them that they were in strong health, and that if they had been hard-worked professionals in England, they would have been ill once a year, instead of once a month. Homœopathy was a great boon to them, and so was hydropathy. So was the grape-cure and all the humbug invented by non-professionals, such as hunger-cure and all that nonsense.
Our parents suffered from asthma, an honest and respectable kind of complaint, which if left to itself, allows you, like gout, to last till your eightieth year, but treated systematically, and with the aid of the doctor, is apt to wear you out. Grandmamma Baker, who came over to Blois, compared them in her homely Scotch fashion to two buckets in a well. She was very wroth with my father, when, remembering the days of his youth, he began to hug the idea of returning to Italy and seeing the sun, and the general conclusion of her philippics ("You'll kill your wife, sir") did not change his resolution. She even insinuated that in the olden day there had been a Sicilian young woman who received the Englishman's pay, and so distributed it as to keep off claims. So Grandmamma Baker was sent off to her beloved England, "whose faults she still loved."
They leave Blois for Italy.
The old yellow chariot was brought out of the dusty coach-house once more, and furbished up, and, after farewell dinners and parties all round, the family turned their back on Blois. The journey was long, being broken by sundry attacks of asthma, and the posting and style of travel were full of the usual discomforts. In crossing over the Tarare a drunken postilion nearly threw one of the carriages over the precipice, and in shooting the Pont de St. Esprit the steamer nearly came to grief under one of the arches. We stayed a short time in Lyons, in those days a perfect den of thieves. From Avignon my tutor and I were driven to the Fountain of Vaucluse, the charming blue well in the stony mountain, and the memories of Petrarch